ACLU: Snowden Proved NSA Internet Spying Harms Americans

BALTIMORE — The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued the National Security Agency and the Justice Department on Tuesday, challenging the government’s practice of collecting personal information from vast amounts of data harvested directly from the Internet’s infrastructure.

The suit filed in federal court in Maryland accuses the NSA of harvesting virtually everything sent via the Internet between Americans and people outside the United States, and then using search terms or identifiers to identify and monitor foreign intelligence targets.

A similar challenge was turned away by the U.S. Supreme Court, which said the plaintiffs couldn’t prove they’d been harmed. This lawsuit says that’s changed since the government confirmed the surveillance after its scope and details were leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

This “upstream” surveillance of the Internet’s “backbone” of digital networks reaches far beyond any individuals the government is targeting to protect the United States from terror attacks, and violates constitutional protections of free speech and privacy, the plaintiffs say.

The suit’s other plaintiffs include The Wikimedia Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA, the Rutherford Institute, PEN American Center, The Nation magazine, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Global Fund for Women and Washington Office on Latin America.

Wikipedia was included on an NSA slide Snowden leaked in 2013 that demonstrated the agency’s interest in monitoring communications on certain websites. That frightened Wikipedia contributors, particularly in countries where human rights aren’t respected, whose anonymity is essential to the free flow of information, founder Jimmy Wales said.

The Wikimedia Foundation — which hosts 12 websites including Wikipedia that received more than 248 billion page requests between October 2013 and October 2014 — is directly threatened by the fear that the U.S. government can share the surveillance information it gathers with intelligence agencies in other countries, Wales wrote Tuesday.

“Surveillance erodes the original promise of the Internet: an open space for collaboration and experimentation, and a place free from fear,” he wrote.

The NSA made no public comment on the suit, but current and former U.S. government officials have said in the past that their collection of Internet data is authorized by a secret intelligence court and targeted to minimize the ingestion of American communications.

They acknowledge that some communications of American citizens are collected in pursuit of foreign data, but they say those are subject to special handling, including blacking out the names unless they are relevant, and they say a U.S. citizen or resident can’t be targeted without a specific warrant.